Friday, September 9, 2011

20 years ago I was, along with many of my friends, spending quite a lot of time on computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). Most of us had already been doing this for many years, and there were people out there who'd been doing it even longer. The BBS scene at the time was pretty sophisticated we thought.. it was becoming possible to do some really great things!

One of the things that I thought was really great was playing computer games against other people in different places. This idea was still pretty novel, as computer networking, the way we think of it today, simply wasn't possible with most home computers – what few even existed. Most BBSes only had a single phone line for people to connect, and so out of necessity virtually every BBS game was turn-based, usually allowing a single turn per day. So, every day, I had time set aside to dial in, see what had transpired since the previous day, and take my turns.

One of my favourite games, and one of the few that I remember in any detail, was Esterian Conquest. It was a multi-player take on some of the early empire-building 4X games, set in a small two-dimensional galaxy, where each player had to build a fleet of ships, and go forth and conquer by force or diplomacy. Don't let the simple idea fool you though.. EC was a beast of a game, with simple rules that allowed for a plethora of complex results. Early on, my nightly turn would take but a few minutes to think about and execute, but later in the game I could literally spend hours pouring over reports from my fleets, hand-drawing maps on graph paper based on the information they contained, and then planning out and tediously punching in new orders for all of my fleets and planets.

About four years ago, while cleaning out boxes that had been in storage for ages, I came across a folder containing papers from the last game of EC I ever played. There were printouts of reports covered in pencil notes about possible actions to take, maps with quick calculations of how long it would take my fleets to reach some hot-spot in the game galaxy, and sheet after sheet of new orders.

Fleet 66 join fleet 47

Fleet 32 reduce speed to 5

Fleet 73 move to star at (12,41)

Everything about the game came back, and I started to wonder if it could somehow be resurrected. I had heard years before that the source code to EC had been lost in an all-too-unfortunate hard drive crash, but digging around in more boxes I did manage to find a floppy disk with the copy I had for the BBS I'd briefly run myself. Sadly, it proved to be more work than I had time for to get a computer running that could both run modern networking and connect that to an old DOS game. So I decided that instead, I'd just write my own.

I spent the next few months mapping out the game I'd like to create.. what I thought at the time was probably the first ever Turn-based Strategy MMO. I started writing documentation: how would I like the game to work? After chatting about the idea with a friend of mine, he gave me a photo-copy of an old table-top game he'd played called Stonova for ideas (it was based on Chris Wilkes' "Nova"). I worked out plans; I taught myself the math I'd need for three dimensional navigation (I wanted my game to take place in a realistic three-dimensional galaxy). But, when I really got down to it the game I had in mind would have required programming skills, particularly in the area of graphics, that I just didn't have the time to acquire. The idea was grand, but it was beyond me at the time. So I put the idea away for a while.

A couple of days ago, for no particular reason I can recall, I started thinking about this again. My original idea had been too grand for my meagre programming skills. But what if I scaled it down? In the last few years it's been proven that web-based games can work, and do attract players. So what if I ditched the desktop game idea, and went with the much easier to program web-based game? Games like Travian certainly seem to attract players, and as the basic concepts go it isn't all that different from what I had in mind.

My game will be simpler than EC in places, and more involved in others.

In EC it was possible to send your ships to any point in the galaxy, and along the way they would send back reports if they came within sensor range of any other passing ship. You could interrupt their orders mid-trip and have them pursue whom they spotted, or run away, or slow down and quietly follow at the edge of sensor range. I think I will simplify that a lot, and very likely only allow travel to other stars, not the spaces between them. Fleets will report on other fleets they find in their current star system, but I think I will drop the requirement to calculate intersecting flight paths, and handle changes in destination mid-flight.

EC had a small number of fixed ship types that you could build, and assemble into fleets. I think I'd like to have a bit more range in this area, so I'm going to design a technology research system that will allow players to concentrate on improving certain aspects of their ships. Are you a fan of big weapons? What happens when you go up against your opponent who has put all their research into heavily armoured ships? Or, maybe you just want to build really fast ships that can run away easily when threatened.

EC had no system of trade that I can recall. My game will allow players to trade resources, and might even have some sort of in-game cash economy. Perhaps you won't build warships at all, but will instead build big, fast transport ships and survive by supplying everyone with what they need... and paying tribute for "protection" where necessary.

So, I've started working on the idea again. I have no idea what will come of it, or whether I'll even finish. I haven't even got a name for it yet.. but I'm curious to see what I can come up with.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Last week I rode my bike from Toronto to Québec City and back for the 81st IETF meeting. This is only the second long ride I've done (the first was to Ottawa in May), and the first where I didn't have complete control over which days I'd be on the road – and thus, no control over what weather I'd be riding in. Seeing as it was a work trip, I'd have to carry my laptop, and so some means of keeping it dry would be necessary.

Since a laptop won't fit in my wee Ogio saddle bags, and neither they nor my laptop backpack are waterproof (and I didn't want to wear a backpack for 900km anyway) I needed something I could strap to my bike that would fit a long narrow piece of electronics, and keep it dry.

Rain gear, water, and street boots in the saddle bags, spare gloves,
camera, maps, etc. in the tank bag, everything else in the Seal Line

My usual stop for such things is my local MEC, as they rarely disappoint. This visit was successful as always, and I walked out with a 75 litre Seal Line zip dry bag. At first glance in the store, and while packing, it seemed to be the ideal bag for what I wanted. It's flat and wide, carries easily, holds a week of clothes plus my laptop, laptop bag, and some assorted cables and other gear, and most importantly zips air tight. In fact, after strapping it to my bike I found I had to unzip it to let it deflate a bit.. this made the difference between it poking me in the back all the time and compressing neatly out of my way up on the passenger seat. But, it hadn't really been tested yet... and it would be tested. Oh, how it would be tested.

On the ride home this past Friday, on the leg between Ottawa and Toronto, I ran into a pretty nasty rain storm. Rain wasn't entirely unexpected.. I'd been watching some weather move East toward me from Toronto for a couple days.. but the amount of rain was a huge surprise. I haven't even been outside in a rain storm like this in a long time, let alone out on the highway. As I was passing North of Kingston on Highway 7, Kingston was busy closing down several streets due to flooding. It was some nasty rain.

But lo, and behold, upon my arrival home I found the inside of the dry bag to be.. well.. dry. Bone dry. Where the Ogio bags and me were both soaked, and even my supposedly rain-proof tank bag had some moisture in it, my laptop was saved. Success!

Now if only I could solve the problem of drying out the inside of my helmet in the middle of a downpour.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

I spent some time this afternoon evaluating several screen casting apps for my Mac. It cost me a bunch of time, and a little bit of money, so I thought I'd share my notes to potentially save someone some grief in the future.

For those who haven't seen the term before, "screen casting" is recording video of all or part of a computer display, usually with some sort of voice over, for the purpose of doing a demonstration to be viewed at a later date. It's often done to demonstrate the use, or features, of a piece of software, but lately it's also gaining popularity for sharing things like gaming experiences on video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo.

There appear to be all sorts of applications for doing this today, where there were only one or two a couple of years ago, and they have a fairly wide range in features and quality. Some of the applications I looked at also do "screen grab" (capturing a still image of the display) but I pretty much ignored this in all of them since MacOS comes with a perfectly good utility for this (Grab.app). Full reviews below the cut.

During the day, and often at night, Matt works as a DNS infrastructure operator. He is the former DNS Operations Manager for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (the organization that manages the .ca Internet domain), has worked DNS operations at Afilias (.info, .org, and several others), has served on the board of directors of DNS-OARC, and currently works as the Sr. DNS Engineer for Rightside (.ninja, .rocks, and many others) ... though he doesn't speak for any of the above here.

He enjoys live music, good beer, and speaking about himself in the third person.